Government diseconomies

On Saturday, I was sad to learn that the DC Office of Planning and DC Dept. of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs are going to end up in the SW quadrant of the city, at the development that is being built on the site of the old Waterfront Mall (it's classic government strategy to prop up developers by leasing lots of office space from them).

The terrible thing about this is it will likely increase the time required to travel to and from these offices, by moving them from relatively convenient center city locations to distant places located a significant distance away from other activity centers. (Govt. officials usually tout this as an economic development strategy, but you need tens of thousands of office workers to begin to have significant impact on daytime retail and service offerings.)

Definitions:

Agglomeration: The association of productive activities in close proximity to one another, as in a major specialized industrial region or in a large town or city (Dictionary of Human Geography). Clustering of activities in space.

Agglomeration Economies: Savings or benefits firms realize by clustering together (The World Economy: Resources, Location, Trade, and Development). Frequently associated with the collective use of the infrastructure of transportation, communications facilities and other services (Dictionary of Human Geography).

I call the practice of moving DC government agencies all around the city without adequate regard to clustering and the utilization of transportation infrastructure "intra-city sprawl."

This is another instance of how siting decisions for DC Government agencies should be required to be based in part on transportation demand management principles.